but eyes closed in sleep, eternal sleep. I’ve killed her.
Mother’s plan had changed. She no longer wanted a trusted angel to oversee the jihad. She got greedy. She wanted her daughter back, and she wanted to go to find Hannon and kill him herself in a ship named War, with a painter, a cowboy, a ghost. She wanted vengeance. She was dying, as she is now, each moment growing a little younger, feeding from this desert plain, the silver within my dying body, the silver that whispers to her even now:
When she reached to activate destruct, they shot off her hand.
Precious cargo: Catalyst. Maire was a jealous mother. She wanted her little flower returned.
Slipping into madness. Strength through calm, confidence. No room for weakness, emotion, showing that emotion. The weak show emotion. The most poignant struggle: devotion to what seemed a lost cause, drowning within phase and something so much more. Never gave up hope, although voices commanded from the space behind eyes. Grasped to that which was ineffable: memory, cherished memory. Wound. To wound. Me.
Would I have taken my own life, given something more than a bubble, an ocean, a Machine voice?
Hold on…So tightly to those memories, of the moments, the sighs, the
To know that I killed her…To know that a fragment of me shot her hand off. Did he love?
How the work suffers for lack of clarity. How these final moments seem so trivial, not a fitting testament at all to a love that spanned decades and souls and something so much more than words. Ours is the story of a plague; we were the lost soldiers; mine are the tainted lips; ours is the broken love, spreading this contagion through the night. It is almost over.
The child looks younger.
Frantic now because I can feel its grip tightening. Silver. Suffocation. Crawling. It whispers.
They shot off her hand and took her home. They left Berard’s vessel to collapse upon itself.
I can only imagine her fear, her confusion. Going home to a world now dead, now empty of all life except the child sleeping at its center, the machines she made in those centuries, hollowing out the planet to create Guerra, and a cowboy named Hank. Fictional character, but she made him real. Twisted mind of a broken child playing god: let’s build a cowboy.
Lilith went home to meet the mother she’d only known through dreams, through whispers at night, through that tickle at the base of the skull. Role-reversal: child becomes adult, adult becomes child. They fed on one another, fed on this war created by silver. One died as one lived.
I miss her. She’s right here in my arms, in my heart, but I miss her. For the first time in so long, that touch is gone.
Let me fall; let me join her soon, but not before vengeance. Please give me strength.
Whistler and Nine safely transported her home to a dead world, a dying parent. Maire and Whistler and Nine and Hank and Lilith, all strapped into Gary, turning Earth inside-out in his departure, killing our home that we barely knew, feeding from the entire system to fuel his journey beyond light. Maire knew the target, knew even then: a systemship within which Hannon had hidden a star, a dying god, the last remnants of his species.
They flew.
I remember Machine’s capture, the collision and scraping. I remember the draining bubble, torches cutting into my prison, that tug of language behind the eyes as they lifted me out.
The child speaks to me without words, begging. Begging. Time is paused; this weapon
The truth I saw finally in Hannon’s eyes, the lifetimes he saw in mine. He’d found me, or maybe I found him, drawn together between stars and times by the ineffable, inexplicable. Our paths intersected and it was the way it was supposed to be.
Moments of proof and realization.
Maire’s attack on god, that clandestine infection of the host body, the release before her exile…The infection had spread to every world in Hannon’s system. Immediate, deadly, certain. This was a different silver, pure from the lumbers, pure from Maire’s time on the edge of the system. Will we ever know where it came from?
It spread from Berlin and Hannon’s command vessel above the silenced first planet, using the carrier lines to crawl to each planet, disseminate in each atmosphere, attack and kill everything without the marginally-protective Y chromosome. It was neither a quick nor painless death. Hannon was allowed to watch his wife and daughters writhe in agony from afar, become infertile, silvered. Afflicted. Within a century, all would be lost. There would be no next generations.
They developed a way to contain the infection with a cardiac shield placed above and around their hearts. It only prolonged; it didn’t solve.
His was a systemship of men. By the time he found me, there were no more women.
I remember looking at the shielded star hidden at the vessel’s core. So lonely. And within…
What placed me in this body, this mind, this soul? What made me a part of this jihad, made my life any more significant than the trillions of others who have fought and died in this war? Why does a man become a focal point of history and existence when he would have so much rather lived in blissful anonymity? There are strands that connect us throughout time and space, drawing us together, pushing us apart. I just wish I knew why I wasn’t born into someone else, someone who died in the initial invasion, someone who rests now, unknown, forgotten forever. I don’t want this.
I saw so much when I touched Judith, when I touched God, but I never saw the answer. I never found out why it has to be me. I don’t think she knew; the silver is something so much more than a dying ancient. The silver transcends time and space, comes from somewhere we can neither comprehend nor acknowledge. It screams from beyond, itches under my skin and there is the trigger, cool and unyielding, yet it could yield if I applied pressure. Voices.
The heart speeds toward
How human they were, how exactly like us except for two hearts, black blood, less oxygen in their atmosphere. The same uncertainties, the same power plays, the same emotions of loss and rage against Maire. She was our creator; forty thousand years hidden below the surface, directing our evolution, bumping our ancestors a few steps up the ladder. We were born of her.
How human they were, fraught with the same desires, the same weaknesses. We were born of a defect: Maire and her prey: Berlin. She called to those early men, drew them into caves, altered their course toward
How human they were.
I remember shiver and tickling, that resonance that allowed us to pass through miles of solid glass into the trapped and wounded solar system.
I saw the first signs of Hannon’s troubles, the fireworks of his civil war. Even in that moment, they fought from within, internal power struggle threatening to ruin everything Hannon had set into motion, the great showdown between the remnants of his species and she who had ended so much.
Great fleets of vessels within the systemship, men fighting a war because they could, not because they really understood the severity of the situation. Maire had killed because of a plan gone horribly awry, an attempt to make a statement about her species’ dependency on the machines. She wanted to kill, yes, but that desire became ultimate. The taste of blood drowned her senses. Machines no longer mattered; she was consumed by silver machines herself. She lashed out, initially with Berlin and Kath’s help. They realized their mistake, and paid for it with everything.
Visions of a night sky, stars unlike these or home, great wailsong of the lumbers in schools, blotting out the stars with blackness miles long. Warmth of skin, cool of air, the hope that they could change things, that they could retake their homeworld from machines with the simple technology reaped from giant flying trees.
Maybe some of the men on Hannon’s vessel felt they no longer needed God. Maybe they thought if they surrendered her to Maire, the plague would end. So they fought, vessel to vessel, surrounded by glass, a sun
